SparkReceipt Help

How to set up automations in SparkReceipt

Use automations to create recurring expenses or income, auto-assign details or publish matching documents, and steer AI extraction with custom instructions, for example to add Tags by address or PO number, remove zero-value line items or rename line items.

SV
Written by Sampsa VainioUpdated Oct 15, 2026

Automations let SparkReceipt do repetitive bookkeeping work for you — creating recurring expenses or income on a schedule, auto-assigning categories, payment methods and tags to matching documents, and applying custom AI instructions to your extractions. They run in the background; you set them up once and forget them.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/WAw83pZgcMA

The three automation types

SparkReceipt supports three kinds of automations. You can create as many as you need (with one exception — see AI instructions below).

  • Recurring expense or income — Automatically creates a new expense or income document on a fixed schedule, e.g. monthly rent, quarterly insurance, or weekly client retainers.
  • Auto-assign details — Watches incoming documents whose merchant or payer name or tag matches a rule you set, and overwrites fields like category, subcategory, payment method, and tags.
  • Custom AI instructions — Freeform natural-language rules that are applied during AI extraction. Available on the Elite plan only.

Where to find automations

Web app. Open Account settings from the left sidebar and select Automations. You can also go straight to it at app.sparkreceipt.com/dashboard/settings?tab=automations.

Mobile app (iOS / Android). Open the main menu drawer, tap Account settings, then tap Automations.

The list view shows every automation in your account, with tabs to filter by type. Use Create automation (web) or the + button (mobile) to add a new one.

Recurring expense or income

Use this when the same document needs to appear on a regular schedule — rent, salary, subscriptions, retainers.

Schedule

Pick a frequency and the timing fields it requires:

  • Daily — runs every day.
  • Weekly — runs on the chosen day of the week.
  • Bi-weekly — runs every two weeks on the chosen day.
  • Monthly — runs on the chosen day of the month (1–31). If a month is shorter than the chosen day (e.g. day 31 in February), the document is created on the last day of that month instead.
  • Yearly — runs on the chosen month and day each year.

The schedule uses your account's time zone, which is shown under the schedule editor. The background job that triggers due automations runs hourly, so a document may be created up to about an hour after its scheduled time.

Document template

You configure the document the automation will create:

  • Document category — expense or income, plus the category itself.
  • Merchant or payer name — the document's display name (required).
  • Tax calculation: Tax included or Tax excluded.
  • Tax type: VAT, GST, HST, PST or GST+PST. For GST+PST you enter the GST amount and the PST amount separately.
  • Total amount, tax amount, currency.
  • Subcategory (item category).
  • Payment method.
  • Tags.
  • Description — free-form notes copied onto the generated document.

Each scheduled run creates a fresh document with these values. Subsequent edits to the automation only affect future runs; previously generated documents are left untouched.

Auto-assign details

Use this to keep documents categorized consistently when SparkReceipt scans them. The rule fires automatically whenever a matching document is created, and (for documents younger than 10 minutes) also on update.

Conditions

  • Document category — limit the rule to either expenses or income.
  • Merchant or payer name — the string the rule looks for. You can leave it empty if the rule has a tag.
  • Match type: Contains, Exact match or Wildcard. With Wildcard, * stands for any text: "Uber*" matches "Uber Eats", and a single * matches every document. Letter casing never matters.
  • Has tag — match only documents that carry this tag. You can use a tag on its own instead of a merchant or payer name. If you set both, a document has to match the name and carry the tag. You set this condition in the web app only. The mobile app keeps it when you edit the rule there.

A rule with a tag also runs when the tag is added to a document later, whether you add it yourself or another auto-assign rule adds it. Editing a document that already has the tag doesn't run the rule again.

Fields you can assign

A rule must set at least one of these fields:

  • Document category: switch the document between Expense and Income. This doesn't set the accounting Category.
  • Merchant (or Payer): overwrite the name. Use this to file differently printed names under one Merchant, for example every name containing "AMZN" as "Amazon".
  • Category: the accounting Category.
  • Payment method (only for expense rules).
  • Tags: added to whatever tags the document already has, or put in their place with Replace existing tags.
  • Assign Review status: for example mark documents from a trusted merchant as Reviewed.
  • Xero tracking — sets a tracking option on every line item, one for each of your Xero tracking categories. This shows only when Xero is connected and has tracking categories, and you set it in the web app only. The mobile app keeps it when you edit the rule there. If an option is later archived or removed in Xero, the rule skips it, still applies its other changes, and notes the skip in its activity log.

Only the fields you enable in the editor are written. Everything else on the document is left alone. If multiple auto-assign rules match a document, they all run, in no guaranteed order.

Publish matching documents automatically

When an accounting integration such as QuickBooks Online or Xero is connected, the web editor has a Publish to accounting integration section. Tick Publish matching documents automatically and every document the rule matches is published to your accounting software once the rule has run. This is how you auto-publish only documents from merchants you trust and leave the rest for review. Contributors can't turn this on.

A document whose amounts the scan flagged as possibly wrong waits until someone sets its review status, then it is published. An Admin, the Owner or an Accountant can turn this hold off with Hold flagged documents for review in the accounting integration's settings. See QuickBooks Online integration.

A rule set up by a Member or Contributor that changes the review status stops working when the account turns off self-review (see Approval circulation for receipts/documents). It then doesn't publish those documents either.

When rules run

A rule runs on every document in the account. A rule created by a Contributor runs only on that Contributor's own documents. Rules run when a document is added or scanned, so they do not apply retroactively: a brand-new rule does not rewrite documents you already have, and editing and saving a document doesn't run it again. To run a rule on a document you already have, rescan the document. For a rule with a tag, you can instead remove the tag from the document and add it again.

Custom AI instructions (Elite plan)

Custom AI instructions let you write plain-English rules that are applied as a post-processing step on top of the AI extraction result. They can change categories, tags, descriptions, totals, line items, and other extracted fields.

This is the most flexible automation type — it can do things the structured rule editor can't, like "If the merchant is a restaurant, food court, or food delivery service, set the category to 'Meals and Entertainment'."

Plan requirement

Custom AI instructions require an Elite subscription. The editor shows an upgrade notice and disables the inputs if your current plan doesn't include it.

Configuration

  • Document scope: choose Expense Documents, Income Documents or General Documents. Only matching documents run through the instruction. Bank statements count as general documents, so a General Documents instruction can act on a statement's details, such as its Tags, when the statement is scanned. It doesn't change the statement's transactions.
  • Instructions — up to 500 characters of free-form text describing what the AI should do.

Limit

Each person on the account can have up to 10 custom AI instruction automations at a time. Once you hit the limit, delete an existing one to create a new one.

Tips for writing effective instructions

The in-app help sidebar (click Tips for writing effective instructions in the web editor) has a longer guide. The short version:

  • Be specific. "Set the category to 'Meals and Entertainment'" beats "put it in the right category".
  • Use clear action verbs: "set the category to", "add the tag", "remove line items where".
  • Refer to fields by name (category, description, hash tags, line items, total amount).
  • For conditional rules, state the condition and the outcome separately.
  • Keep one goal per instruction — create multiple automations rather than one long instruction.

Example: "Tag all expenses from Amazon, eBay, or AliExpress with #online-shopping."

What custom AI instructions can change

An instruction sees the document's text and what the scan extracted, including each line item's name, quantity and amount. It can change:

  • the Merchant or Payer name, the description (shown as Details), the reference number, the date and the due date
  • the totals, tax amounts and currency
  • the Category, Tags, payment method, document type and review status
  • line items: rename them, change their Category or amounts, merge them, or remove them

It can't set AI Fields values or an exchange rate, and it can't look at your other documents.

Examples for common requests

  • Tag by address, for example one Tag per rental property: "If the document mentions 12 Example Street, add the tag #12-example-street. If it mentions 40 Sample Road, add the tag #40-sample-road." Tags belong to the whole document, so this works when each document is for one property. See How to use tags (dimensions).
  • PO number as a Tag: "If the document shows a purchase order number (PO, P.O. or Order No), add that number as a tag." This also works on receipts imported from email, because every scan runs your instructions. To keep the PO number as its own column in reports instead, use an AI Field.
  • Remove zero-value line items: "Remove every line item whose total amount is 0."
  • Quantity in front of the line name: "If a line item's quantity is greater than 1, put the quantity and 'x ' in front of its name, for example '3x Wireless Mouse'. Leave lines with quantity 1 unchanged."
  • Business address or location in the details: "Add the merchant's street address and city to the description." You could also add the city to the merchant name, but then every location becomes its own Merchant in Merchants & Payers.
  • Tell similar line items apart: "Line items whose name contains a size such as 60x40 are crates: set their Category to 'Packaging'. Line items that mention a deposit are returnable plastics: set their Category to 'Returnable packaging'." Use the words or sizes that actually appear on your documents. Because Tags belong to the whole document, put amounts that need to be kept apart on line items with their own Categories.
  • Tag bank statements with the account's last digits: with the scope set to General Documents: "If the document is a bank statement, add a tag with the last four digits of its account number." SparkReceipt also reads those digits by itself and files each statement under the matching account in Account settings → Cards & Accounts → Transaction accounts.

When do custom AI instructions run? Can I apply them to documents I already have?

Instructions run while a document is scanned: new uploads, photos from the mobile app, forwarded and scanned emails, and rescans. Saving or editing an instruction doesn't change documents that are already in your account, and an instruction can't target documents by their review status, such as everything waiting in Pending.

To apply a new instruction to an existing document, rescan it. The rescan reads the document again, runs your instructions, and sets the line items and their Categories again. A rescan of an already scanned document is free, but it overwrites corrections you made by hand, and there is no bulk rescan, so it works one document at a time.

For Categories only, the Documents view in the web app has Auto-categorize uncategorized in the selection actions. It categorizes the selected documents that have no Category yet, following your custom AI instructions, and skips documents that already have one.

Activity log

Every automation has an Activity log that records each time it ran and what it changed. Open it from the row's overflow menu (web) or from the automation detail view (mobile). The log shows the date, what the automation did, and a link to the affected document, when applicable.

For recurring documents the log shows the document that was generated; for auto-assign and AI instruction automations it shows which fields were modified. An auto-assign rule that matched but changed nothing is logged as Activated (no fields modified).

Editing and deleting automations

Each automation row has an overflow menu (the three dots on web, or the row tap on mobile) with Edit, View activity log, and Remove actions. Editing a recurring automation reschedules the next run based on the new settings; the existing schedule is reset and recalculated immediately.

Deleting an automation is permanent. Documents that the automation already created or modified are kept as they are.

What automations can't do